The Xbox 360 – need HDTV to get the full experience. The PS3 – need HDTV to get the full experience. Stores everywhere are slowly coming down on their prices so that more and more people will be able to afford them. But with all those events happening, and all these systems requiring HDTV to unlock their full visual potential, are gamers even really finding their lack of HDTV a huge issue?

From the article:

Ultimately, the gamer is looking for the best gaming experience, and HD is a part of that, but not the end-all. Equally important is inventive game play, which is the main focus of Nintendo with the Wii. I don’t think Nintendo will lose out on customers by not offering HD. Following Sony and Microsoft’s lead on offering the latest in HD would have added too much cost and negated one of their greatest strengths for this generation.

A determining factor in market success will be if the [Blu-ray] format ultimately becomes the dominant one for high-def DVD. If it does, this will result in a very important advantage for Sony over the life of the console. Microsoft can counter-punch by delivering a Blu-ray add-on, which is the advantage of [their] modular approach, but, as I stated, a fully integrated box at price parity is a more attractive box for consumers.

Publishers have to consider both HD and standard definition in this go-around. When selling into markets in transition, which is the TV market today, publishers can’t assume the consumer has one type of technology over the other. Capcom’s lack of consideration for non-HD TVs was a big mistake, since the majority of gamers today do not have HDTVs.

Read the full article over at Gamasutra.com

Posted in General News

Remember the Gizmondo? More than likely, you probably don’t. It was a handheld system that promised the world, cost more than double the Nintendo DS, and was ultimately a failure comparable to that of the Virtual Boy. The story doesn’t stop there, however, as there is a fascinating article out now about how one car crash brought the truth of the Gizmondo full circle, revealing that the system was nothing more than a criminal’s tool to swipe a ton of money.

From the article:

In the early 2000s, Gizmondo rose to prominence as the maker of a handheld gaming device designed to compete with Nintendo’s DS and Sony’s PlayStation Portable. The company touted its gadget as the next big thing in pocket electronics and, at one point, talked of moving half a million units in just a few months. But critics panned the device, and it failed to entice many customers. A month before Eriksson went off the road, Gizmondo declared bankruptcy, having hemorrhaged nearly $400 million in less than four years.

It might have ended there, another high-flying company with big ambitions and a lousy product. But the crash put a spotlight on Eriksson and raised a series of questions: Who is he? What kind of person drives nearly 200 mph on a coastal highway? The answers led to even more puzzles. In just a few years, it seems, Eriksson went from languishing in a European jail cell to making millions as a tech executive to, even more improbably, becoming deputy commissioner of antiterrorism for an obscure Southern California transit police force. Before ­Eriksson lost control of his Ferrari in Malibu, no one in the US really cared about his strange story. But after the supercar came apart, Eriksson would find every inch of his life under scrutiny by the LA County Sheriff’s Department, federal law-enforcement officers, and the media. That’s when Eriksson and a tangle of cohorts would find out just how large a little bump could loom.

Read the full article at Wired.com

It’s always fun to think over a hard puzzle and then finally get the results, but the only thing better than hard earned satisfaction is cold hard cash. The Contest Center has up a few mind bending puzzle games where you could have the chance to win some cash. The contests each have a entrance fee of about $11 – $12, but if you think the rewards outweigh the risk, perhaps it is a site worth checking out.

You know, I wondered why every time I called them up, looking to see if the games I wanted were in yet, why they hadn’t started selling preorders. Well, news comes out now, from the company’s annual sales conference that Gamestop stores will not have preorders for the Wii or PS3. Is the included quote all there is to the story? With the demand and shortage of PS3 units to be available at launch, is Gamestop really just trying to save itself the hassle of dealing with pre-buyers who get angry when their shipment doesn’t come in.

From the article:

The news came about from the company’s annual sales conference last week. President of Gamestop, Steve Morgan said, “The great thing is there is a lot of demand. But launch is one day. And really the key to this business is what flows are the launch. We did learn a lesson last year. I think the lession is caution and optimism at the same time.”

News comes from gaminghorizon.com

Relationships between China and Japan have never been an easy thing, and recently things happened to further put a dent in that partnership, and it is because of one new game featuring a female hero. Based on a popular Chinese story, the new Japanese developed game has altered the content, so that it now plays as an adult warning adventure.

From the article:

Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as Dream of the Red Mansion, by Qing dynasty (1644-1911) author Cao Xueqin, chronicles a noble family’s declining fortunes, and is often regarded as the zenith of classical Chinese fiction. The Japanese computer game, however, features images of scantily-clad young girls attached to chains and comes with an adults-only warning.

While the game’s setting has little to do with the epic novel, its Chinese critics believe the main character — a pallid young girl called Lin Daiyu — is a direct take-off of the novel’s heroine. They say the story’s character has been slandered; she’s described in the game as an illegitimate child born after her mother had an affair with a foreigner.

Read the full article at Wired.com

There’s trouble in the online gaming world when the actions of a renegade player threaten to destroy Blizzard Entertainment’s award-winning game World of Warcraft. The future of the game lies in the hands of Cartman, Kyle, Stan and Kenny when all new episodes in the tenth season of the widely-acclaimed series, “South Park,” premiere Wednesday, October 4 at 10:00 p.m. on COMEDY CENTRAL.

In this episode, the boys come into contact with a gamer who doesn’t play by the rules. Even the creative people behind World of Warcraft don’t know how to stop the renegade. They are forced to put all of their hope into the hands of the kids of South Park. The boys dedicate their lives to defeating the mad gamer and saving the game for all.

“We were excited to hear that the creators of ‘South Park’ were interested in featuring World of Warcraft in the opening of their new season, and we really enjoyed collaborating with them to make this happen,” said Mike Morhaime, president and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “We’re looking forward to sharing the experience with our employees and our players as well when the season debuts this week.”

Videogames teach children to kill. Videogames make people ignore real world violence. However, for every piece of research that comes out to say how bad videogames can be, another researcher is looking into the positives of playing videogames, and this time research indicates that videogames can actually promote sociability by allowing players to experience different opinions and world views.

From the article:

According to Constance Steinkuehler, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Dmitri Williams, a professor of speech communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MMOs can “promote sociability and new worldviews.” The two researchers liken the virtual worlds of MMOs to coffee shops or pubs where “social bridging” can take place. The duo published the study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication under the title, “Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as ‘Third Places,’ ” seemingly inspired by the classic TV show Cheers. (“Third places,” it should be noted, was coined in 1999 by sociologist Ray Oldenburg to describe the physical places outside the home and workplace that people use for informal social interaction.)

“By providing places for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace and home, MMOs have the capacity to function much like the hangouts of old,” said Steinkuehler and Williams.

In the study, the two professors took a close look at Asheron’s Call I and II and Lineage I and II, which they believe to represent “a fairly mainstream portion of the fantasy-based MMO market,” which encourages cooperation and the formation of groups. Continuing the Cheers pub theme, they wrote that the gameplay in these MMOs is not a “single solitary interaction between an individual and a technology, but rather, is more akin to playing five-person poker in a neighborhood tavern that is accessible from your own living room.”

Read the full article over at GameDaily.com

To the rangers at Harpers Ferry National Park, Holli Myers might have struck them as a bit peculiar. As this Vestal, NY native meandered the park she would stop and stick her had in the knot of a tree, or bend over to look carefully under a rock formation or stone wall. Not the typical behavior of a tourist at the West Virginia park. What they didn’t realize was that Holli Myers was not the typical tourist, she was on a quest…for treasure; and her mission was about to pay off.

From an ancient tree on the banks of the Shenandoah River she removed a small copper coin with the phrase etched into it “You clever, clever person!” Holli was indeed a clever person, for her and her team had just solved a mystery that had confounded thousands of other people. The coin that she had discovered was worth over $50,000 in treasure.

Holli’s team had found the main prize of The Guardian’s Amulet, the first in a series of nationwide treasure hunts from treasure purveyor ScrollQuest.com. The Guardian’s Amulet is essentially a treasure map, with clues to a treasure hidden in it’s cryptic text and illustrations. Since it’s release in November of 2005, this “ScrollQuest” has sent thousands of its readers scouring the country in search of a mysterious coin that would be their ticket to winning a $50,000 bejeweled amulet. Holli and her team rose above the competition, winning this real-life treasure and the respect of the treasure hunts creator.

“We’re so proud of these ladies.” said Jason King founder of ScrollQuest.com and author of The Guardian’s Amulet “We really couldn’t have ended up with a nicer set of winners.”

Holli was part of a three-woman team of “treasure hunters” that put their heads together to unravel the mysteries hidden within the Guardian’s Amulet. Holli, along with Vickki Martinus, of Tulsa, Oklahoma and Martina Thompson of Allen, Texas, spent several months working on the puzzles contained within The Guardian’s Amulet. They even coined a name for themselves, “The GAGA Sisterhood”; GA being an abbreviation for Guardian’s Amulet. When the three ladies figured out the treasure was hidden in Harpers Ferry, they turned the actual finding duties over to Myers being that she was the closest of the three to West Virginia. Her eight-hour trip from New York seems to have been worth the drive.

“I still can’t believe it’s real. It seems like a dream I haven’t yet woken up from,” said Myers.

The $50,000 prize for The Guardian’s Amulet is far from the only treasure available from ScrollQuest.com. The companies other two unsolved treasure maps, The Gris-Gris Doll and The Idol of Xi, have a combined prize value of $175,000. For more information on these maps and other treasure hunting stuff visit www.scrollquest.com.

In the 30 years of video game development, the art of making console games has been reserved for those with big projects, big budgets and the backing of big game labels. Now Microsoft Corp. is bringing this art to the masses with a revolutionary new set of tools, called XNA Game Studio Express, based on the XNA platform. XNA Game Studio Express will democratize game development by delivering the necessary tools to hobbyists, students, indie developers and studios alike to help them bring their creative game ideas to life while nurturing game development talent, collaboration and sharing that will benefit the entire industry.

During his keynote presentation today at Gamefest 2006, a Microsoft game developer event hosted by Microsoft in Seattle, Chris Satchell, general manager of the Game Developer Group at Microsoft, announced details of the new technology, which will be broadly available this holiday season. XNA Game Studio Express will be available for free to anyone with a Windows XP-based PC and will provide them with Microsoft’s next-generation platform for game development. By joining a “creators club” for an annual subscription fee of $99 (U.S.), users will be able to build, test and share their games on Xbox 360 and access a wealth of materials to help speed the game development progress. This represents the first significant opportunity for novice developers to make a console game without a significant investment in resources.

During his keynote, Satchell talked about academic institutions that are lining up to include XNA Game Studio Express in their course offerings. Also showcased was the work of key XNA supporters Autodesk Inc. and GarageGames. Through the Microsoft XNA relationship with Autodesk, the leading provider of 3-D authoring software, game developers and enthusiasts can now more easily incorporate content into XNA Game Studio Express via Autodesk’s FBX file exchange format. Joining Satchell on stage was Mark Frohnmayer, president of GarageGames, who showcased ports of its next generation Torque tools and technology over to the XNA Game Studio Express platform.

XNA Game Studio Express Opens Up Game Creation to the World By providing an integrated, seamless development environment based on Visual Studio Express and .NET that simplifies the integration and use of game content, XNA Game Studio Express makes game development easier to accomplish for smaller projects, strongly increasing the chance for great game ideas to make it out of the concept stage and into the hands of gamers everywhere.

The XNA Game Studio Express beta will be available Aug. 30, 2006, as a free download on Windows XP, for development on the Windows XP platform. XNA Game Studio Express will give anyone with a Windows XP-based PC access to a unified development tool that liberates the creation of great Xbox 360 and Windows XP-compatible games, providing a new alternative to the existing multithousand-dollar development kits that many console games require. The final version of XNA Game Studio Express will be available this holiday season.

“XNA Game Studio Express will ignite innovation and accelerate prototyping, forever changing the way games are developed,” Satchell said. “By unlocking retail Xbox 360 consoles for community-created games, we are ushering in a new era of cross-platform games based on the XNA platform. We are looking forward to the day when all the resulting talent-sharing and creativity transforms into a thriving community of user-created games on Xbox 360.”

Not only will XNA Game Studio Express turn the community into creators, but a second XNA toolset geared toward game development professionals is scheduled to be available in spring 2007, fundamentally changing the way commercial games are developed.

The Beginning of the Game Developer Revolution From students at colleges, universities and high schools of the future to the proverbial “guys in the garage,” Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express will liberate anyone with a great game idea to create titles for Xbox 360 and Windows XP simultaneously. More than 10 universities and their game development schools – including University of Southern California, Georgia Tech College of Computing and Southern Methodist University Guildhall – have already pledged to integrate console game development and XNA Game Studio Express into their curricula for the first time, and Xbox 360 will be the only console at the center of all coursework.

“Great game ideas are incubating in the minds of students everywhere,” said Michael Zyda, director for Gamepipe Labs at the University of Southern California. “With XNA Game Studio Express, Microsoft is investing in these next-generation innovators, creating the canvas for dreamers to express their powerful game ideas. In incorporating XNA Game Studio Express and Xbox 360 consoles into our Gamepipe program, USC will be able to better provide game studios and publishers around the world with a newfound wellspring of talent and opportunity. It’s ingenious.”

In addition, GarageGames, technology provider and developer of one of the most successful Xbox Live Arcade titles, “Marble Blast Ultra,” has migrated both its Torque Shader Engine and new Torque Game Builder 2-D visual game designer over to the XNA Game Studio Express platform.

“The GarageGames mission has always been to provide top-tier technology, tools and community to independent and aspiring game developers,” said Josh Williams, CEO of GarageGames. “We are excited that Microsoft is demonstrating leadership by taking the revolutionary step of opening up game development for Xbox 360 to hobbyists and students. In aligning our tools and technology with XNA Game Studio Express, we’re helping even more individuals with the creativity and drive to make video games bring them to life on both Windows XP and Xbox 360.”

I’m playing Dead Rising right now, and jeez am I slaughtering a lot of zombies. I can’t recall the amount I’ve cleaved in half with a samurai sword. Now word comes out that just playing a violent game like that can make you numb to real life brutality. So what evidence do researchers have to back that up with?

From the article:

Playing violent video games, even for only 20 minutes, desensitises people to real-world violence, new research contends.

“We found that the subjects who played violent video games for 20 minutes had lower physiologic responses when they watched videos of real-life violence,” said Nicholas Carnagey, who conducted the research while a psychology instructor at Iowa State University in Ames. He explained that these lowered physical responses meant the person felt less emotional upset when viewing real-life brutality.

All of the participants had similar heart rates and other signs of arousal before exposure to real-life violence, which included videotaped shootings, prison fights and police confrontations. The people who played violent video games for 20 minutes had lower galvanic skin responses (lower perspiration) and heart rates while watching the real-life footage. “A lot of other studies on exposure to violent video games indicated that we would find this, but it surprised us that only 20 minutes of exposure was enough to show this effect,” Carnagey said.

Read the full article over at DNAIndia.com